Monday, January 23, 2017

Set Theory

While my real aptitude is in applications, I've always enjoyed theory. I'm enjoying my set theory class enough that I took a day off from Q studying to finish my homework. I figure it's close enough to Analysis that it has to have some carryover to Q prep.

In particular, what I like about "higher" math is that it forces you to go to places that you can't possibly understand. And yet, we're able to learn things about these places and even predict how things work by relinquishing our senses and building structures that are completely abstract. It's a lot like religion, really.

Consider the complete lattice. It's a set where any subset has a least upper and greatest lower bound, but the ordering in between is murky at best. Some complete lattices, like the integers {1, 2, 3} are easy to understand. Others, like the power set of the real numbers on the interval [0,1] where the partial order is inclusion, are a but more difficult to wrap your head around. But, you can just not worry about that and prove stuff anyway.

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